I am pleased to announce the development of a platform independent
mechanism for OCaml based on its virtual machine. That is, the ability
to checkpoint an application on any platform (hardware and OS) for which
the OCaml byterun run-time exists, and then restart it in a possibly
different platform. We have built this capability into OCaml 2.02. It
required a few minor modifications to the OCaml virtual machine, but it
should be very easy to upgrade to OCaml 3.x. We hope that the OCaml
development team would consider adding this as a standard feature in the
official distribution, since it can be another good argument for using
OCaml.
A technical report describing our work is available from
http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/users/wwwb/cgi-bin/tr-info.cgi?2000/CS/CS-2000-11.
We are eager to receive comments and/or suggestions and will be happy
to provide the source to anyone who asks for. An official (free)
distribution will be made available in the (hopefully) near future.
Adnan and Roy